Between the Lines

City of Protest: A Recent History of Dissent in Hong Kong

The world watched in 2014 as Hong Kongers, increasingly desperate to achieve democratic elections before the expiration of its semi-autonomous constitution in 2047, staged dramatic street occupations to demand universal suffrage. According to lawyer and writer Antony Dapiran’s book City of Protest—published as part of a Penguin series around the history of Hong Kong—the Umbrella Movement and its outpouring of creative expression, in the form of installations, posters and other artwork, is linked to a genealogy of dissent reaching back to the 1960s. From fired-up citizens raging over Star Ferry price hikes to the “Fishball Riots” of Mong Kok in 2016, Dapiran makes a case for enduring protest culture in Hong Kong, in an environment where political unrest can engender, in some situations, real change. In just 109 pages, Dapiran offers comprehensive insight into the cultural and identity politics that have shaped the city-state, revealing a glimmer of what is yet to come in the years leading up to 2047.

BY YSABELLECHEUNG

THEJAPANESEPHOTOBOOK, by Manfred Heiting and Kaneko Ryuichi.

The Japanese Photobook

A blurred photograph of a pocket wristwatch fronts a hefty color tome of Japanese photography. This is Shomei Tomatsu’s Atomic Bomb Damage: Wristwatch Stopped at 11:02, August 9, 1945, Nagasaki (1961), which shows a timepiece whose hands froze at the exact moment of Nagasaki’s decimation. The opening pages take us further back, to documentation of the Meiji Emperor’s night funeral in 1912, where the images were illuminated by bright magnesium flares. Chapters on Japanese photography from then till 1990 are accompanied by hundreds of pictures, from early snaps of daily life to an illustrated photomontage of Germany’s influence on Japanese design in the early 20th century, an example of which includes a Koshiro Onchi-designed edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Long-gone periodicals make an appearance here and attest to Japanese photographers’ status as “encylopedic preservationists.”

BY YSABELLECHEUNG

Charting Thoughts: Essays on Art in Southeast Asia

A scattering of tiny, gold numbers grace the cover of Low Sze Wee and Patrick D. Flores’s hefty, soft-backed compendium, which contains 25 illustrated essays by scholars that detail pioneering ideas in Southeast Asian art historical discourse, illuminating often-overlooked aspects of the past. For example, Yvonne Low examines the role of women artists and early 20th century, colonial-social art clubs in Singapore, while the concept of nationhood and its limitations looms large in texts by TK Sabapathy, John Clark, Lee Weng Choy and Simon Soon, who each draw parallels between countries across the region. Kevin Chua and Marie-Odette Scalliet reflect on the power dynamics involved in writing art history itself, and Adele Tan looks at photos of modern and contemporary artists posing next to their artworks, asking: “Could it not be possible too, to entertain ideas about the incorporation of marginal photos into the art historical narration of Malaysian artists?”

Scouting for Locations

Ghassan Kanafani’s 1963 novella Men in the Sun is an iconic story of Palestinian hardship: three men from a refugee camp in Iraq can’t find work and arrange to be smuggled into Kuwait, but suffocate in a truck’s water tank en route. In artist Yazan Khalili’s book Scouting for Locations, published in both English and Arabic and bound like a notepad, a film crew making an adaptation of Men in the Sun disappears in a Gulf city. Alongside quotes in Arabic and translated English from Men in the Sun are many dozens of images depicting an empty, anonymous city—sites that the crew visited—scribbled over with additional notes and symbols. We search the images for clues just as the crew must have searched the city—yet no results are yielded. One senses the film crew’s wandering, meant to capture the rootlessness of Kanafani’s characters, in this para-fictional project that Khalili first showed at Sharjah Biennial 11 in 2013.

BY HG MASTERS

Made in North Korea: Graphics from Everyday Life in the DPRK

This cotton-candy-pink hardcover book comes with 500 color illustrations of domestic visual ephemera, offering a cross section of North Korea’s state-sanctioned designs—from taffy packaging to beer-bottle labels and New Year’s postcards. The vintage material comes from nomadic architect and curator Nicholas Bonner’s own collection, which he amassed from 1993 to 2005 during several trips to the isolated country to establish Koryo Tours, a company that specializes in group travel to the DPRK. Bonner’s eight journal-style essays, each bearing titles of popular mottos such as “Let’s Wear Our Hair in Socialist Style,” places these designs in historical and social contexts, and astutely draw a distinction between aggressive Western (mis)branding in everyday products and that of a world which is so closed to outside economic forces that purer, more naive aesthetics still dominate.

BY YSABELLECHEUNG

(Left)SYRIA: INTOTHELIGHT. (Right) MADE IN NORTHKOREA: GRAPHICSFROMEVERYDAYLIFE IN THEDPRK, by Nicholas Bonner.

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